Press Release / For Immediate Release Silicore Releases VMEbus to PCI Bridge System-on-Chip (SoC) Under Open Source License January 20, 2004 - Bus & Board Conference / Long Beach, CA - USA. Silicore Corporation announced today the release of a VMEbus to PCI Bridge System-on-Chip (SoC) under open source licensing. The bridge system is provided as a VHDL soft core, and is intended to run on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chips.
The bridge SoC is released under the GNU Lesser GPL License (LGPL). Under that license anybody can download, use and modify the bridge code without any royalties or other fees. According to Wade Peterson, President of Silicore, "This bridging system uses a dual, internal WISHBONE System-on-Chip bus. These are organized as 16-slot backplanes with shared memory blocks. The memory blocks can be replaced with other off-the-shelf core functions, such as those available from the OpenCores organization. This is a very nice structure where the System-on-Chip itself acts like a modular, 16-slot VMEbus system."
In a related move, Silicore also announced its support for a new initiative called OpenVME. This is a community development program aimed at creating and promoting VMEbus interface chips. Peterson added that: "The industry needs this because so many users are demanding longer product life cycles...often on the order of 10-20 years. Current interface makers just can't deliver that. To make matters worse we have seen a rash of standard VMEbus interface chips go obsolete lately, which has cost a lot of money to fix. Open System-on-Chip technologies like WISHBONE are portable, and can be moved from one platform to another if a device goes obsolete. This means that parts obsolescence will soon be a thing of the past in the VMEbus industry. All of this will be done through community code development much like we see in the GNU/Linux world. In order to get things rolling, Silicore is releasing the bridge system under the LGPL license so that it can serve as seed code for other interfaces."
Contact Information and Related links:
Wade Peterson
Silicore Corporation
6310 Butterworth Lane
Corcoran, MN 55340
TEL 763-478-3567
wadep@silicore.netSilicore Corporation website: www.silicore.net
Download the bridge System-on-Chip at: www.silicore.net/vmecore.htm
OpenCores website: www.opencores.org
The OpenVME Project: www.OpenVME.org
The Bus and Board Conference: www.busandboard.com
Press release copyright (C) 2004 Silicore Corporation. Verbatim copying and distribution of this press release in any medium is permitted, provided this notice is preserved.